1906.] on Walter Pater. 215 



was at all events no doubt that it displayed qualities of high and 

 seductive art. 



But Pater had to pay a penalty for his candour and for his daring. 

 In 1877, the year in which a second edition of the Renaissance was 

 called for, there appeared one of the most brilliant and suggestive 

 satires of the century. The Neiv Eepublic, written, it is astonishing 

 to reflect, by Mr, W. H. Mallock, when he was almost an under- 

 graduate, represented a gathering of brilliant and talented people in 

 a country house, who discussed various aspects of modern life. The 

 characters were thinly veiled portraits of the celebrities of the day, 

 such as Matthew Arnold, Ruskin, Huxley, and Jowett. Among these 

 was introduced a languid and dreamy person, Mr. Rose, with new 

 and startUng theories about art, upholding a kind of sensuous and 

 emotional paganism. The portraiture was made unmistakable, in 

 almost all the characters, by the introduction of sentences from the 

 pubHshed writings of the great men thus parodied, into their talk. 

 It must be confessed that Mr. Rose is a supremely undesirable 

 personaUty. He creates in the mind the impression which is best 

 expressed by a mysterious phrase culled from the pohce reports, when 

 a man is charged with being a suspected person. Mr. Rose is a 

 suspected person. The drearnful beauty of his talk only thinly veils 

 a reckless and seductive paganism. It is ridiculous to find pompous 

 fault with the youthful author of this extraordinarily briUiant satire 

 for not having foreseen contingencies. Mr. Mallock was caricaturing 

 in this typical figure a species of aBsthete, of the school of Maudle and 

 Postlethwaite, that was beginning to emerge at Oxford and elsewhere. 

 These young men made a kind of gospel out of Pater, without 

 imitating the austerity of life and the lofty intellectual standard 

 which he himself upheld. Moreover, the indiscretions of his sparkhng 

 talk, the blithe gaiety of mood which led him in those days to aim at 

 starthng sedater persons, lent themselves to misrepresentation. The 

 result was that Pater was unjustly identified with Mr. Rose, and the 

 identification caused him considerable pain. As he said once, 

 pathetically, to Mr. Gosse : " I wish people would not call me a 

 Hedonist ; it creates such a bad impression in the minds of people 

 who don't know Greek." Unfortunately, there were many people 

 who did not know Greek — who knew Pater only through his books. 

 Jowett himself, who was severely parodied in the Neto Eepublic as 

 the enlightened Latitudinarian, took fright, and deUberately set him- 

 self to thwart Pater's academical ambitions — they were not reconciled 

 till the end of Pater's Hfe. 



But Pater worked quietly on, producing his little masterpieces. 

 In 1878 appeared, among other pieces, The Child in the House, which 

 I would unhesitatingly recommend to anyone who may wish to make 

 acquaintance with the finest flower of Pater's production. It is just 

 a study of the early impressions of a perceptive child, and is obviously 



